


as we approach the winter

by unrivaled_tapestry



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Hubert and Edelgard are old, Multi, Past Character Death, Post-Canon, Suicidal Thoughts, it's sad, queerplatonic life partnership
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:41:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21789973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unrivaled_tapestry/pseuds/unrivaled_tapestry
Summary: It's said that Edelgard von Hresvelg and Hubert von Vestra spent the rest of their lives together, though never spoke of their true feelings for each other. One winter, they do talk about their feelings for other people.
Relationships: Edelgard von Hresvelg & Hubert von Vestra, Edelgard von Hresvelg & My Unit | Byleth, Ferdinand von Aegir/Hubert von Vestra
Comments: 18
Kudos: 156





	as we approach the winter

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, a little bit of a sad story to kick off my entry to the Fire Emblem fandom. Please read the tags carefully. All of the warnings are for things that happened in the past. I got the idea to write this after reading their paired ending text, and this fic uses very broad definitions of the word 'love'.

Hubert von Vestra lurched over the dwindling fire, his long arms reaching, snakelike, for the pile of firewood off to the side. He deposited a couple cords, and the flames eagerly ate at the flesh of the white birch. He extended his hands towards the fire, letting them linger. Heat eased the pain in his knuckles, but he wasn't one to dwell on comfort for too long. A minor burst of magic to stoke the flames, and then he sat down on a nearby couch, cursing his rotten old bones. His father had never lived to be Hubert's age, but Hubert wondered if his sixth decade would have brought the same soreness.

"You should sit away from the window, your majesty," he said, breaking the silence.

The figure sitting in the moonlight at the edge of the sitting room turned her head to acknowledge him. Her hair was an even more brilliant shade of pale than it had been in her youth, and she appeared—as she always did to him—as a creature not of this world. Her eyes were as alert as always, and at the moment touched with annoyance.

"In a minute, Hubert," she said, turning back to the window. "I heard the guards talking. They think it will snow tonight."

Hubert reached out to the steaming tea set on the table to fill one of the empty cups. It only shook a little, but he steeled himself.

"Could you pour me one?" Edelgard asked, focused on the night again.

He smiled. "Of course." He repeated the experiment.

Rising from his seat, he strode across the sitting room with her cup. She reached to take it from him. She sipped and seemed to sink into the warmth. 

"Very good." She rested the plate on the lap of her red dress.

"It's an acquired taste," he said, holding his own cup.

He let it warm his palms, let the scent waft up to and through him. It had a sweet, spicy smell. When he'd been young, he found tea too weak. People seemed to drink it for the experience rather than the energy, and thus he'd preferred coffee. In the light, he knew it to be beautiful, a kind of rich reddish gold that his eyes liked getting lost in.

"Hubert?"

"Yes?"

She kept her face staring intently out the window. "Does it make you think of him?"

As he processed her words, Hubert felt a tearing somewhere deep inside him. An old injury, heavily scarred over but still ready to rip open. Twenty years was a long time to ache, but it still did.

When he didn’t respond, her shoulders stiffened. "I've overstepped. Hubert—"

"If I'm honest, that's why I acquired the taste." He set the cup back down. "I steeped it too long."

"It's lovely," she said. He heard the porcelain clatter together in her lap, and her shoulders started to shake as a series of wracking coughs overtook her. Hubert almost rose again, but she gestured for him to sit back down, pressing a handkerchief to her mouth. When the fit subsided, she forced in a gulp of air and swore.

He buried his gaze on the ancient rug in the middle of the floor. "You've had that cough for a while. It sounds deep."

"It is," she replied, taking another sip of tea, this time to calm the irritation, to focus. At the look on his face, she sighed heavily. "I've been to the healers. Linhardt looked into it. They aren't worried and neither am I."

He watched her as he rose and walked to a stack of wool blankets in the corner. He acquired one stained a red deep enough to match her dress. He carried it stride by stride over to her chair, where she allowed him to drape it over her shoulders. His hands shook as he wrapped it over her chest. "It's cold," she complained.

"It will warm up." He stayed by her side, hands tightly coiled behind him as he let his eyes adjust to the darkness. The sitting room oversaw the high mountain lake, which was placid and sparkling under the full moon. In the distance, jagged peaks lined with thin evergreens reached up to scrape at the stars. "She's not out there, your majesty."

"I know that," Edelgard said, her voice sharpening. "You don't have to join me in my melancholy, but don't patronize me."

"I would never dream of it," he said, voice even. "Perhaps I do want to join you in your melancholy."

"I miss Byleth on nights like this." Edelgard gestured to the moon. "After the war, we'd slip away from the palace dressed like...ordinary people. We stayed in inns, slept under the stars sometimes. At night it felt like it was just the two of us in the whole world."

Another ache began working in Hubert's chest. He saw a brilliant sun, an impression of autumn leaves. Mornings. Nights. Tea and coffee. Quick laughter, heat in his cheeks. He remembered a span of twenty years and something like love.

"I miss Ferdinand all the time," Hubert said, and the words came out of him like sutures ripping loose. That name had once flowed from him easily, but he hadn't formed it in such a long time that it felt clumsy, unreal.

"You don't talk about it much." Edelgard looked up to him.

Hubert pressed a hand up into his hair. How could he? The whole affair made him weaker, made him a worse servant to the emperor. Love was a trifling thing, and he'd let it burn him. A rivalry turned into an easy companionship that he let fall into a lovely dream. It wasn't like the love he felt for Edelgard—Ferdinand always knew she came first, he hadn't been naive about that—but it became real, sweet, and smooth.

Summer arrived at the end of a bitter cold that year. The frost cleared just before a herald arrived in the capital from the Aegir estate to deliver the news. The Prime Minister—then just 43—went out on a hunt and had fallen from his horse. The royal entourage prepared to travel there when another messenger said that Ferdinand never awoke from the sleep he slipped into, despite the best efforts of the present healers.

Hubert wasn't proud of his behavior in the weeks afterward. He'd disappeared into his quarters, expelled every servant and soul, vowing that only he and the goddess would know what he was like storming his rooms, spilling noxious magic and letting his mind fall apart.

"What is there to say?" he asked, voice rasping out of him.

"I have something to say," Edelgard admitted. "I thought I'd lost you, too."

“Never, your majesty.” Hubert swallowed something thick in his throat. “I’m still surprised you didn’t break the door down.”

“I considered it.” Edelgard pulled the corner of the wool blanket tighter around herself. “Byleth talked me out of it.”

“Did she now?” Hubert caught himself staring at his hands now. “It seems I always learn of more gifts the professor gave me.” He furrowed his brow. “Out of curiosity, what did she say?”

“That you were strong.” Edelgard’s voice hitched on the last word.

A painful bolt shot through Hubert again, for the second time that night. He wasn’t sure what he expected Edelgard to say, but he’d assumed it was something about everyone grieving in their own way. Trust Byleth to have given Edelgard faith in her friends, above all.

“I’m not sure I would agree. It was so long ago, and it still feels like a dagger in my chest.” He could visualize it; his flesh grew around the wound like a twisted tree wound over an old stump. “Did you doubt my strength?”

Edelgard shook her head. “Of course not. That’s not what I meant. I knew you were strong I just…didn’t want you to have to do what you did alone.”

Hubert didn’t remember those days in detail. They were just a soup of rage and pain. He did remember being proud. “With all the affection in my heart, I think I needed to be alone right then.”

“I understand,” Edelgard said. The night hung between them. Behind Hubert, the fire cracked and popped. Outside, clouds began drifting over the moon. Soon the pass would be closed, and they would be shut off from Enbarr for a few glorious weeks. Edelgard closed her eyes and bent her head, gray hair falling out from under her blanket. “I was glad to have you at my side later on.”

Hubert knew what she was talking about.

Byleth lived about a decade longer than Ferdinand, and her death came at the end of years of warnings and months of omens. A human body wasn't meant to host a god, and she never fully recovered from the strain of being separated from Sothis. She managed the effects for much of her life, but they increased in severity until the Wings of the Hegemon was bedridden and the end approaching.

She passed before Wyvern Moon that year. All of her living students came to visit during that time, and Edelgard was at her side when she left. Hubert had retired for the night when it happened and wasn't sure what they said to each other in those last few hours, what whispered promises were made, or what confessions told.

It felt right to leave—fate denied him goodbyes with Ferdinand, that didn't mean he deserved to infect Edelgard and Byleth's last moments together with his own grim presence. After all, he and Edelgard would have the rest of their lives, so he let her have that night and its secrets.

Edelgard's grief was more public and lasted longer. She oversaw a grand funeral, a parade ending with Byleth interred and the masses whispering about a new saint. No stranger to grief, Edelgard bore it as she bore all other things—with grace and familiarity, like an old friend. Though Hubert saw what others may have missed—Edelgard moving a little more slowly, a little less patient, or looking over her shoulder for advice that wouldn't come.

"Byleth was confident we would see each other again, though not in this life," Edelgard said, and as she spoke, a smile worked its way onto her face. "Because of her relationship with the goddess. She believed we were part of a cycle that would repeat."

"That's a nice thought." Hubert kept his own smile a thin line. What did he believe? Not much. He believed in the heat, the cold, the magic he summoned to whisk life away, and the hard material world that kept him away from someone who was gone. He believed in the passage of time, and the absence of someone who was not, and could not, be there again. He tried not to ponder what ifs any more than he spent time lingering on what it was like to miss someone as badly as he missed Ferdinand von Aegir.

"Do you think they're waiting for us?" Edelgard's voice was neutral, more ponderous than hopeful.

Hubert shrugged. "I think one rests in the crypt at Gareg Mach and the other's ashes are scattered by the eastern sea. Beyond that, I wouldn't dare to say."

Edelgard laughed, and it sounded bitter. "We're quite a pair."

Outside, the clouds had darkened the night, and they glowed a kind of warm gray the way clouds heavy with snow tended to.

“Your majesty,” Hubert said as the first miniscule snowflakes began to drift over the pines. They looked like ashes. “I have made very few requests, in the time we’ve known each other.”

“Do you have one now?”

“I do.” He took a steadying breath. “If I should die first, please scatter my ashes where we did Ferdinand’s. It won’t matter to me much, of course, but…the thought gives me comfort in this moment.” He pledged his life to Edelgard, but his death was another matter.

“Of course, Hubert.” There was a long pause from Edelgard. “Now that you’ve brought it up, I have a request as well. I wish to be interred at Gareg Mach, alongside her if possible. There’s a mausoleum ready for me in Enbarr but…”

She trailed off. Hubert knew. She had no desire to rest alongside her siblings or late father in the dark.

Hubert inclined his head. “You need only to ask.”

“What a grim pact,” Edelgard said. “But thank you.”

Intense affection swelled through Hubert. He loved her. He'd loved her when he was young, and he loved her now, with both of them old and lost, left to the aftermath of the work they'd done. In truth, she was the only reason he'd survived losing Ferdinand. Without her as a waypoint, knowing she was waiting for him outside his door, he wasn't sure what would have happened. He liked to think his path would right him, but…who knew. He wished their beloveds were there, and he was still grateful time hadn’t taken her yet.

Hubert walked back to the teapot. Steam no longer floated out the spout, and his hands gingerly poured a chilled cup. The scent of rich spices still filled the cold air; the taste was stale already, but it let him imagine a world where things could be different.

By the time they retired that night, fat flakes of snow blanketed the ground.


End file.
